Cognitive and Mental Health Correlates of Short-Form Video Use

The paper is specifically studying short-form videos like on TikTok or Youtube Shorts, so there would be no implication for videos longer than 3 minutes (the maximum for YT shorts)

Long form educational YT videos are amazing. It makes my brain work hard, and I feel like I learn more.

Short form pop content like TikTok doesn't give my brain enough time to engage the thinking muscle.

I think it's better to identify the characteristics of the media we consume, rather than lumping all of them together.

I hate that I can’t use youtube at all without being forced to fed short form video content. Or kids schools referencing youtube content for educational purposes and they are then force fed short form video content.

Learn to watch at 2x speed (or faster with an extension). Then use the saved time for productive activities.

> hard for me to just sit in silence and think

Maybe practice slowing down by reading a book. Any book, hard copy.

> trying to be more of a producer than consumer

Thank you!

Whenever I search anything in my native language, and I mean literally any topic, one of the top recommendations (if not the top one, which autoplays by default) is the local far-right party. It's crazy. We've become used to this but it's crazy.

This accurately describes the front page of reddit, too.

Oh man, they take random people's clips, stitch them together with a voice over and include false information eg. an incorrect fact about an animal

I hope you don't mean conservative in the usual political sense. I know more conservatives worried about this than not.

I would suggest you make an exception for YouTube shorts from channels / creators that also put out YouTube long-form content.

You'd think I'd be making a point here about "otherwise you'd be missing a lot of good educational content that happens to be packaged short-form"; but no!

The point I actually want to make is much weirder: unlike the other short-form-video services, YouTube's "shorts" don't seem to have any actual time constraints built into the format. And so many creators — especially the ones that normally make long-form content — actually put out rather long "shorts". Like, multiple minutes long.

Which means that a large percentage of YT "shorts" these days are essentially just... regular YouTube videos. Just, er, vertical.

For a while, I was filtering out YT "shorts"... until I realized that some of my favorite long-form creators I had been following had gone mysteriously missing from my feed. And it turned out I was missing all their new videos, because they decided to format+post them as "shorts." These were the same videos they had been producing for years now. Just as long as before. Just in portrait now.

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Tangent: Why are creators even bothering to make these videos and mark them as "shorts", if they're not actually short-form videos?

Well, creators are incentivized to do this, because YT is really pushing shorts; and so, if you make your video into a "short" — whether or not it's a short-form video — your video will get promoted in many shorts-only UI carousels and recommended areas of the site and apps, that it otherwise wouldn't. (This easy route to promotion is especially tantalizing for newer creators trying to "break through" to a self-sustaining audience.)

And YT itself is incentivized, now that they have all this frontage to push "shorts", to have a constant stream of new "shorts" to push — whether or not those "shorts" are really in the spirit of short-form content.

YT and the creators are effectively aligned in an implicit agreement to violate the spirit of "short-form video" in the name of bringing more attention to what's basically their same old content format.

I'd also ban autoplay of the next video. You have to be involved in choosing the next video to watch (or none).

Information for its own sake to obtain doesn't have any lasting effect, it makes sense why you forget. Try to intake the information and have it cue a relation to your life, have it spark some internal thought. I'm struggling to articulate this, I've always been "a thinker", just think about things all day. I rarely finish books because whatever I read I think about it for so long.

It's my own personal reflection on information, knowledge, and learning, I hesitated to write this comment but I did at the chance it helps.

Information is basically a commodity these days. The leverage is in how the info informs your thoughts.

I have YouTube.com and X.com IP blocked on this computer for exactly that reason.

Because I noticed I have zero self-control with the short-term video format. So now I don't touch it and consider it similar to cigarettes.

You don't. This is where taking public transport to work shines.

are you watching talks while driving?

One thing I've tried recently, was that going no-nothing while driving: so no music, radio, nothing, just me and my thoughts.

It's been immensely pleasurable, like I've rediscovered myself.

But I still have an issue with finding a good long form video to watch while washing up, or shorts while I'm waiting for CI to finish at work, etc. I need to find something else to do.

something along the lines of "you can't remove an addiction habit, you can only replace it"

they want your time

Yeah, I find it odd how hard they push it, like trying to shove it down my throat levels of pushing shorts. I already use their platform heavily, just for regular videos. My guess is they get more data from how you interact with shorts and they find that to be super valuable info over what they get from regular video watching.

They want more of your money. They will monetize you as much as they can. You're just a well-supported, paying product.

companies don't work like people, there is no limit to their desires. Trying to appeal to the good taste of a trillion dollar company is, as the anecdote goes, like letting a tiger swallow you up to the shoulders and then demand that it spare your head.

Get Unhook extension (for desktop)

The subscription revenues is a decent chunk of your lifetime value (LTV) as a customer, but it's not all of it. The goal here is to squeeze as much value from you aside from that as possible, measured mostly by two things, really: the direct ad revenue, measured by dollars that go on the balance sheet, and the indirect "engagement" value measured by the KPIs (think daily, weekly, monthly active users) that go into the quarterlies. The more time you spend on the platform, the more "things" you have got used to interacting with (aka day-to-day, week-to-week "retention"), the more they can potentially "sell" to you -- and it's not just ads / youtube subscription upsells, it can be and often is other "products" on the same platform: their music streaming, their search, their documents and emails, maps, drive, etc. etc. And it just so happens that the short format is _really, really_ engaging for many folks.

The more time you spend in the mall, the fuller are the bags on the way out, be it out of chance, habit, or convenience.

They want you to never unsubscribe, which requires your addiction.

Incentive to addict + Ability to addict = outcome

I wonder what the issue is with shorts? Usually if I look something up on youtube (say a how-to or a product review), I don't want to see a half hour of blithering that could be compressed to a tweet. I generally pick the shortest video I can find about whatever it is. If it's limited to under a minute that's great. I'd really rather have a text post than a video, but those don't seem to exist any more.

This is my frustration as well. It seems like Premium should be all about optimizing for the experience the user wants, without the same dark patterns as the ad-supported site.

The worst is search. Shorts are fine as a row in the recommended stuff that I can watch if I want something short or mindless, but when I search I almost always want a normal video. In the iPhone app I can filter for normal videos, but on the AppleTV, the search is 85% shorts to the point of being useless.

Google is a monopolist. They have no real competitive pressure, so they're incentivized to extract as much value from you as possible rather than waste time trying to retain you as a user (cuz where are you gonna go lol). Forcing short form video on you could be seen as either an attempt to get you addicted to the format, or just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion.

No matter what you decide to do, they're going to profit off of you. The only remaining question is "how much".

Personally, I don't want to make it easy for them. That's why I like to use alternative YouTube frontends that limit data collection and block ads. I sure as shit don't pay for premium. Whatever effect that has on their business is likely negligible, but it at least makes me feel better about the situation.

I use ublock origin for this. Also the NYT Opinion section because ain’t nobody got time for that nonsense.

Sadly this requires a browser plugin. Happily, those exist. I also pay for YT and use "enhancer for youtube" which can do a plethora of things, one of which is to disable shorts.

By being a paying subscriber, you've indicated:

* that you grow attached to video content if they can get in front of you

* that you have disposable income

* that you're willing to spend disposable income on video content and probably other things

* that people associated with you, those you network with on their system and those you share content with via links, are more likely to share one or more of these traits with you, compared to people they know nothing about

By paying them, you've inherently invited them to try to squeeze more value from you and betrayed that your own social network probably includes many similarly ripe marks for subscription sales or effective ads.

So pushing the content they think best represents their future income streams, in hopes that you eventually grow attached to it, or at least occassionally share it with your network of ripe marks, is of course going to be their strategy.

In the modern marketplace, subscriptions don't buy you out of ads or capitalist annoyances, they just suggest that you're an even more valuable target for sales and marketing than those who haven't.

The best thing you can do is stop paying and wean yourself off YouTube. It’s terrible for your mental health.

People are less likely to quit buying something when they’re addicted to it.

Google wants you to be addicted to YouTube. It makes you more likely to renew.

And it helps keep you off competing platforms (TikTok, reels, etc).

Honestly, I use revanced on my android phone which lets me disable all shorts content appearing. and on browser if i stick to the subscriptions tab and maybe the sidebar on videos, there's no shorts.

You can. Turn off Youtube history, it disables shorts. Not an ideal solution if you actually did want to keep your Youtube history, but this works.

There's some thoughtful comments here already, but I wonder the same thing constantly as a fairly addicted user of YouTube who wants to avoid short form video altogether.

I think Premium users tend to be the most affluent desirable group for ad targeting (similar to iOS users on other platforms) and even though YT Premium lets you avoid ads on YouTube, I suspect one's activity feed/"algorithm" on YouTube factors a lot into Google (and others'?) ad targeting. The same eerily effective feedback loop for getting TikTok and YouTube suggestions works better with short-form video, so even if users aren't seeing ads, YouTube still has an incentive to have people use it. So, there's money to be made in dialing in your "algorithm" from using YT Shorts even if you're a premium user.

I'm sure the other stuff about KPIs for increasing usage of shorts to compete with other media sites is accurate too

If YouTube was an independent company, which it'd be nice if it was, then by paying for it you'd be supporting YouTube (in case you decided it was worth it and they treated you nicely). But as it is, you're supporting Google, which is arguably an undesirable thing to do given how "evil" they've become. So a first course of action could be to close the tap and don't give them your money for a service that they've enshittified in the name of profit.

They could also make the experience out of the box like SponsorBlock and skip the sponsorship segments, but they don't do that either for their paying users.

uBock origin + some filters works fine.

Also the weird YouTube Playable Games thing that shows up every few weeks.

Use the Brave browser and look at the inbuilt filtering (search for "Content Filters" in settings), it allows explicit removal of shorts via enabling of "YouTube Anti-Shorts" filter list. Does the job beautifully.

I would consider paying premium if they allowed me to disable shorts

On pc i use chrome plugins to block all these distractions from me. It work's pretty well. Any idea how to do it on android phone. You can't intercept http requests or edit apps here that easily.

There is a 3rd party Android app that uses the accessibility APIs to (supposedly) track and limit my short video use. However, it's broken, so I can't watch short videos at all :)

I don't think getting addicted to constant serotonin boosts from enjoyable videos is that much better to be honest.

The nature of the content is an important variable to control for in future work, but the primary negative impact appears to be via the devastating effect on human attention.

From the paper: "repeated exposure to highly stimulating, fast-paced content may contribute to habituation, in which users become desensitized to slower, more effortful cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving, or deep learning. This process may gradually reduce cognitive endurance and weaken the brain’s ability to sustain attention on a single task... potentially reinforcing impulsive engagement patterns and encouraging habitual seeking of instant gratification".

The danger of short form videos is because the form enables the algorithm designer to artificially maximize the reward with minimum effort by the viewer. It doesn't matter whether you watch kitten ones initially. After watching it for a month casually, chances are you would end up watching some addictive videos for hours with little effort. It could be some endless stream of Buddhist monks talking about suffering, if someone likes that kind of thing. It's just designed to be addictive with crazy high reward/effort ratio.

It may be that some media or some alcohol is more toxic than others, but it's still fair to test whether the mode of administration has an independent or enhancing effect.

E.g., crack cocaine is more addictive than nasal, and extended release Adderall is less addictive the immediate-release. So there's good reason to hypothesize that SFV has similar addiction-enhancing effects over long-form, and the article meta-analysis says problems in inhibition and cognition are among the strongest.

wrt choice, the thing about addiction is that while becoming addicted results from a series of choices, being addicted impairs your choice-making executive functions. Addicts use even when they don't like it, and to the exclusion of other things they prefer, and often switch from expensive drugs to cheap ones just to maximize use.

So in the same way that society would prefer to prevent rather than treat legions of fentanyl addicts infecting cities or meth addicts roaming the countryside, society would like to avoid the cognitive decline and productivity loss of a generation lost to scrolling.

I didn’t even click the link, just read the top two comments and closed the page before realizing what I had done.

In fairness, I think reading abstracts is a good way to 1) quickly gain information and 2) figure out if the paper is worth the time to read. Especially for paywalled papers, and when I'm trying to get a broad sense of different ideas, consuming a few tens of abstracts is a nice way to get a feel for the research.

On a somewhat different note, I also tend to only read the comments of HN threads and Youtube videos...

What's the problem with that?

I'm not in that field of study and I'm not going to attempt to perform all of that science. That has been delegated to other scientists. They produced a comprehensive study, which summarizes to layman terms as "short form bad."

You're not required to understand the nuts and bolts of why. Hell, if you want you can just blindly accept whatever you want, but I think accepting highly peer reviewed studies to do the research for you.

Why would you think it's not explicitly intended?

> This I only write because people sometimes get in to an obsessive social media cutting frenzy spending effort that would improve their lives much quicker spent fixing diet or exercise.

Not cutting social media would make these difficult-- e.g., limiting exercise to just stationary machines where they can watch Tiktok and reach their dopamine hit goals for the day.

Is it important to stress that though? This feels like a personal responsibility argument while also acknowledging that it disproportionately affects people who don't have a ton of control over their response to it.